Boston is a city with rich history, vibrant cultural traditions, influential and prestigious academic institutions, and wildly successful sports teams. It is a city with much to be proud of. However, it is also a city with much to improve upon, but some models for improvement lie in cities with vastly different attributes.

Take, for example, Curitiba, in southern Brazil. The city of nearly 2 million inhabitants has been internationally recognized as a beacon of sustainability for a host of reasons, including its wealth of green spaces, pedestrian-friendly areas and notably, its groundbreaking mass transit initiatives.

Curitiba is lauded as the birthplace of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). Introduced in the city beginning in 1974 by innovative Mayor Jaime Lerner, who oversaw several reforms which have contributed to the city becoming the model of effective city planning it is today, BRT corridors represent a cost-effective alternative to a traditional underground subway line. BRT is characterized by features such as dedicated bus lanes to help provide right of way and avoid traffic, along with covered and elevated stations where fares are collected prior to boarding and boarding takes place from platforms situated on the same level as the buses in order to streamline and speed up the process.

The Institute for Transportation & Development Policy (ITDP) has outlined the qualifying features of BRT as part of a rating system it calls the BRT Standard, which rates BRT plans worldwide as Bronze, Silver, or Gold. Curitiba’s transit corridor has earned a Gold rating from the ITDP.

As can be seen in Curitiba and elsewhere, BRT is a great model to follow for cities looking to improve their mass transit infrastructure while cutting costs. It would seem that Boston is a fantastic candidate to implement such a system, and it is highly encouraging that the MBTA has already created a Study Group to look into the possibility. In fact, BRT in Boston has already been pursued going back several years. The MBTA’s Silver Line does have some BRT features, but its lack of pre-boarding fare payments or a dedicated lane throughout its route prevent it from receiving a Bronze rating from the ITDP. Additionally, in 2009, a proposal to install BRT service on Route 28 was rejected after some pushback from community groups in Roxbury and Mattapan, but that should not discourage the agency from continuing to pursue BRT as an option in the future. The Route 28 project’s failure can largely be attributed to a poor effort by the state in educating residents about the initiative, which is a very fixable problem.

The MBTA can take a lesson from former Curitiba Mayor Lerner and think a little bit more outside the box in its effort to improve Boston’s transportation outlook moving forward.

Michael Weiner is a senior at Northeastern University studying International Affairs. He began working at Pioneer Institute through the Northeastern Co-op program and has continued as a Research Assistant. Find Michael on Twitter at: @michaelgweiner